Excel® 2007 Power Programming with VBA

Chapter 26. Compatibility Issues

In This Chapter

If your application also needs to run on earlier versions of Excel, Excel for Macintosh, or international versions of Excel, you must be aware of some potential issues. These issues are the topic of this chapter:

• How to increase the probability that your Excel 2007 applications will also work with previous versions of Excel

• Issues to be aware of if you’re developing Excel applications for international use

If the applications that you’ve developed with Excel 2007 will be used only by others who also use the same version of Excel, you can skip this chapter.

What Is Compatibility?

Compatibility is an oft-used term among computer people. In general, it refers to how well software performs under various conditions. These conditions might be defined in terms of hardware, software, or a combination of the two. For example, software that is written specifically for a 32-bit operating system such as Windows XP will not run under the older 16-bit versions of Windows 3.x. In other words, 32-bit applications are not compatible with Windows 3.x. And, as I’m sure you realize, software written for Windows will not run directly on other operating systems, such as Macintosh or Linux.

In this chapter, I discuss a more specific compatibility issue involving how your Excel 2007 applications will work with earlier versions of Excel for Windows and Excel for Macintosh. The fact that two versions of Excel might use the same file format isn’t always enough to ...